Editor’s note: The Redoubt Reporter invited readers to submit photos and haiku poems of and inspired by Mount Redoubt’s eruptions. One photo and one poem were chosen as winners, and those submitters receive a T-shirt, a year’s subscription to the paper and are mentioned below. The Redoubt Reporter thanks everyone who participated. Photo prints are available for purchase from the photographers, or contact redoubtreporter@alaska.net to get in touch with the photographers listed here.

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

As Joe Kashi, of Soldotna, jokingly wrote in response to The Redoubt Reporter’s contest of poetry inspired by Mount Redoubt’s eruptions (with due credit given to John Donne and John Kennedy): “Ash not for whom it blows, it blows for thee.”

In a sense, he’s right (albeit a little corny). The volcano’s unrest has inspired curiosity and creativity in onlookers on the central Kenai Peninsula, and around the world, for that matter. It’s provided excitement, a topic of conversation, some celebrity status among friends and relatives down south, a reason for volcano-watching outings with the family, and motivation to pick up a camera or put pen to paper.

The Redoubt Reporter invited readers to share the results of their creativity with the paper, and is pleased to publish those submissions here.

While Kashi’s whimsical haiku poetry submission:
Redoubt volcano
Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom
Twenty times to date
— didn’t rank tops in The Redoubt Reporter’s haiku contest, one of his photos of the smoldering mountain got top mention in the photo division. The shot was taken at sunset March 31 at the top of the hill on Robinson Loop Road.

Above is the winning photo, taken by Joe Kashi, of Soldotna, showing Mount Redoubt at sunset from Robinson Loop Road on March 31.

“I live at the base of the hill. I heard the volcano was simmering so I went up to take a look with my kid and took my camera,” he said.

He used a Kodak z1012 long zoom camera, which he has been keeping with him in his car, in case Redoubt erupted while he was driving somewhere, he said.

“I had that happen during the iconic April 1990 (Redoubt) eruption, which I saw that morning from start to finish, without a camera,” Kashi said.
Judges Jayne Jones, a photography professor at Kenai Peninsula College, artist and Art Works gallery owner Zirrus VanDevere, and photographer and former central peninsula resident Jay Barrett said they liked the shot particularly for its color and composition.

“Pleasing colors are captured in the sky with a strong movement of ash cloud from the mountain in the distance bringing the ash to the viewer in the foreground and filling the right frame. The dark trees are in the frame just enough to be noticed and create an interesting shape. The exposure is right on as it give us a strong silhouette in the lower one seventh of the frame while maintaining details in the treeline and in the row of mountains dwarfed by Mount Redoubt. This image is pleasing and calming yet deceiving, as we know Mount Redoubt can release its fury with little advance notice,” Jones said.

“It’s a well-composed and well-executed photograph showing the threatening nature of the volcano’s eruption. Pictures of Mount Redoubt are a dime a dozen, but photographs connecting you to the volcano are far more rare. Of all the warm sunset images submitted, this is the best. First, the exposure was right and the blacks were rich and solid. It’s obvious this was not just a snapshot,” Barrett said.

Kashi has been involved in photography on and off in his life, though mostly on, since he was 15 and worked in a photography shop where he grew up in Pennsylvania. He did a lot of photography while attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the editor of the student paper, and studied with Minor White, who co-founded and edited Aperture magazine. Kashi said that, while attending law school in Washington, D.C., he spent Saturdays in the Library of Congress researching photography — the high-quality, but no longer commercially used, chemical processes, lenses, etc.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Kashi taught photography at Kenai Peninsula College, and had a custom photo printing lab for a few years. He shelved photography altogether from about 1986 until 2003, when he started using digital photography in his legal practice. By 2006, he was firmly ensconced in the digital medium, and his wife encouraged him to start doing fine art photography again. His work has been in numerous statewide and local art shows since.

He said he’s been shooting Redoubt photos, “Here and there, whenever Redoubt is visible, and that’s been kind of erratic the past couple months,” he said.

When asked for pointers in shooting the volcano, he recommended underexposing a bit or using the bracketing exposure function on digital cameras, where, in a series of shots, one is a little underexposed, one is a littler overexposed and one is taken at the metered exposure. In cameras that have the function, he also suggested using the expanded dynamic range option, which helps maintain shadow and highlight detail.

Beyond that, though, the old photography expression applies:

“Honest to God, just ‘f8 and be there,’” he said. “A clear view and a clear day and (you get) decent stuff. The weather’s good, so you might as well do it, you know?”

Herb Schaan’s winning haiku poem, “Chalice in the sky,” is one of many creative expressions Mount Redoubt has inspired in him. He lives a few miles north of Kenai on the bluff and has enjoyed an unobstructed view of the volcano’s activity this winter.

“From my front yard it’s just a very beautiful view. It’s wide open, nobody lives in front of me, straight into the water and ocean and the volcano,” Schaan said.
The retired counselor and Lutheran Church worker has lived in the Kenai area for about 22 years. Before that he spent 15 years in Papua New Guinea and eight in Hawaii. He attends the Kenai Writers Group and is working on memoirs from his time spent in Papua New Guinea.

His poem was noted for its strong imagery yet double meaning:
Chalice in the sky
Filled with gold and copper light
Fertile in due time

In a literal sense, it’s a reference to the effects Redoubt’s ash can have on sunlight, and the mountain’s unpredictability.

“If there’s ash, the ash really highlights a lot of the color spectrum — lavenders and just endless kind of peach colors that are just amazing. It’s very exciting to see that because it’s very temporary. You can see that and photograph it and tomorrow it will be something else,” Schaan said.

Yet the poem also gives a nod to the fact that, even though the eruptions are destructive, ash lends fertility to the soil, from which new life will benefit in due time.

“There are aspects about the volcano that I think are fascinating,” Schaan said. “They are a link with the power, deep, deep in the hot realm of the Earth, so deep that we know very little about it to the point where you can’t predict what is going on. It gives the volcano the mystique of, you know, when will it blow?

“I think it’s just fascinating how the creation of Earth’s crust, and the destruction and melting down of Earth’s crust, is going on right before our eyes. There are not many places where you can watch this.”

He’s been e-mailing his Redoubt imagery, both photographic and literary, to friends around the country and world, and it’s been forwarded and re-forwarded much farther than he’s ever traveled, he said.

“It touches something basic in the human mind. The combination of something potentially threatening and overwhelming and at same time something that grabs your interest and makes you stop and look. It definitely is something that stirs human interest in a lot of minds of people who love nature and are inquisitive about how the Earth works. It touches something basic in the human interest realm.”

Redoubt haikus:

Pressure builds, taunting
Yellow to orange, life moves on
Orange, red, at last reliefErin Boehme
Nikiski